A View From the Mountain
This Issue
1 Jim Crow, The Holocaust,& Today
3 Writer-In-Service Award
4 Residency Awards
1 Jim Crow, The Holocaust,& Today
3 Writer-In-Service Award
4 Residency Awards
For Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Lillian E. Smith Center hosted “Jim Crow, the Holocaust, and Today,” a panel discussion exploring the intersections between the Jim Crow South and Nazi Germany. The panel consisted of Dr. Thomas Aiello (Professor of History and Africana Studies at Valdosta State University), Dr. Chad Gibbs (Director of the Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies at the College of Charleston) and Dr. Jelena Subotić (Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University) discussing the historical context and also the importance of knowing this history for today. The essay below is by our director Dr. Matthew Teutsch on the genesis of the panel and his reflections on it.
Planned gifts are a perfect way to provide fellowships for artists in residence at the Center or scholarship funds for students enrolled in the Lillian E. Smith Scholars Program at Piedmont College.
Last summer, I led a directed study, with one student, on Jim Crow and the Holocaust. When the student mentioned to other people the topic of the class, they would stare and respond with one word, “Why?”
A lot rests within that one-word question. Why study Jim Crow? Why study the Holocaust? Why think about the links between Jim Crow and the Holocaust? Why dig up the past? Why put yourself through the psychological pain of reading about it?
Why come face to face with yourself? That question rests at the heart of that one word. It serves as the foundation for resistance to the exploration of the intersections between Jim Crow and the Holocaust here in the United States South because the illumination of those intersections, while informing us of historical facts, turns a mirror upon ourselves, revealing our own complicity in systems that did, and still, oppress individuals.
LES ADVISORY BOARD
Marshall Criser, Chair
Nannette Curran
Nancy Smith Fichter
Robert W. Fichter
Margaret Rose Gladney
Sue Ellen Lovejoy
Susan Montgomery
Tommye Scanlin
John Siegel
W. Austin Smith
Stewart Smith
John H. Templeton
Bill Tribby
The question flies in the face of all we have been taught about the United States and our role during World War II. We defeated fascism and promoted democracy. We stood up to tyranny. We stormed the beaches. We liberated the camps. We . . .
We did do those things, some better than others. Yet, we also participated in fascism. We helped fascism rise in Europe. We had a hand in the construction of the Holocaust. We incarcerated United States citizens in camps during the war. We continued, following the war, to participate in fascism. We continued, following the war, to segregate and oppress individuals. We forced Germany to reckon with its actions while we stood by our own and continued to exploit and oppress millions without acknowledging white supremacy and its impact on the society we inhabit.
We told ourselves half-truths, turning those half-truths into myths that we imbibe, taking into our very cores. When we partake of the myths, we shield ourselves from the true reflection that awaits us in the mirror, the one that stares back at us, giving us an untarnished reflection of our beings. We put a barrier between ourselves and the reflection, willfully obscuring the truth.
“Our myths give the American imagination its oxygen. We breathe toxic air,” Danté
Stewart writes in Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle. They give us a shield; they allow us, as Stewart puts it, “to believe that the words progress and equality and honesty and love are as American as you know yourself to be.” They lie to us. They choke us. They slowly kill us. They deny us the ability to love one another.
For years, I’ve dug into the depths of that myth that shields us from ourselves. I’ve wallowed in the mire and basked in the sun’s rays. I’ve thought about that one-word question and what it means.
That question, specifically in relation to studying the connections between Jim Crow and the Holocaust has led me in various directions. It has led me to think about the need to study these connections in more detail and to educate others on the intersections. That question led to the Lillian E. Smith Lecure Series panel “Jim Crow, the Holocaust, and Today,” a panel that examined the sinews that link Jim Crow and the Holocaust.
The panel explored the intersections between the Jim Crow South and Nazi Germany, discussing the historical context and also the importance of knowing this history for today. The panel consisted of Dr. Thomas Aiello (Professor of History and Africana Studies at Valdosta State University), Dr. Chad Gibbs (Director of the Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies at the College of Charleston) and Dr. Jelena Subotić (Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University).
Over the course of about an hour, we discussed a myriad of topics, but the one that kept coming up again and again was the topic of memory and memorialization. While memorials, memory, and education on the Holocaust are foregrounded in Europe, the same cannot be said about Jim Crow in the United States. Dr. Gibbs spoke about memorials in Charleston, SC. On a corner, where enslaved individuals were sold, stands a memorial to victims of the Holocaust. The memorial to John C. Calhoun casts a shadow on the Holocaust memorial, directly linking, through physical space, the intersections between Jim Crow and the Holocaust.
On the event Gibbs said, “In our crowded and often contentious present, little could
be more important than a comparative and connective look at the hatreds that fueled the Holocaust and Jim Crow. By examining the similar racist thinking behind these two events or outcomes and the ways in which Nazi ideologues and Southern racists informed and fed upon each other, we better understand the importance of confronting hatred no matter how far away and no matter who the intended target.”
Dr. Subotić spoke about how governments in Europe, specifically Poland and Lithuania, refuse to accept their roles in the Holocaust and how memorials within those nations construct the narratives to privilege non-Jewish Polish and Lithuanians. She spoke about Auschwitz and how the Polish government runs the site and how the Polish government, in 2018, passed a law making it illegal for scholars or teachers to talk about the role of non-Jewish Poles in the Holocaust and the aftermath.
“The seminar addressed,” as Dr. Aiello stated, “an extremely important topic increasingly discussed by researchers of both the Nazi regime in Germany and the Jim Crow regime in the American South. That the two existed at the same time, as one country fought another in World War II, and that the Nazis used several Jim Crow restrictions as models for their own policies makes the comparison all the more historically vital.”
Why?
We need to study history, in all of its dirt and grime, in order to move forward. We must realize that all myths do is shield us from reality. They shield us and cause us to become blind to the dirt and grime that sticks to our own skin. They cause us to become nostalgic for a past that never existed, one that privileges whiteness and denies others their existence.
Why?
No one can answer that question for us. Each of us must answer it for ourselves. You can listen to “Jim Crow, the Holocaust, and Today” on the Lillian E. Smith Center’s podcast Dope with Lime, and find more resources on our LibGuide page: https://library.piedmont.edu/ jimcrowandtheholocaust.
Rashida Abulhadi is the 2023 recipient of the Lillian E. Smith Writer-in-Service Award. This award is sponsored annually by a generous gift by Sue Ellen Lovejoy, a member of the LES Center Advisory Board. This award provides an opportunity for those writers who, like Lillian E. Smith, recognize “the power of the arts to transform the lives of all human beings.” Recipients receive an honorarium, travel allowance, and a two-week residency at the Center. The following is Abulhadi on receiving the award.
In this time of multiple escalating global crises, having the dedicated time and support of a residency at the Lillian E. Smith Center is a heartily welcomed respite and a sweet return to one of the places I come from.
I am looking forward to using my time to work on my first full-length book of poetry and spend some time on the mountain reflecting on what is, improbably, already two decades of community organizing and cultural work. After prioritizing almost everything else over publishing my own writing, I confess I’m bolting a bit, sending out a puff of seeds. The crises of the pandemic, radical escalation of eliminatory violence against and academic censorship of Palestinians, and a new disability diagnosis have sharpened my sense of urgency about what interventions my writing, my life might make.
My organizing experiences also shape my book-inprogress, — Baba al-Bab, or My Father the Door —. The poems map the land-mined terrain of multiple escalating political, social, and ecological crises, and the collection is a synthesis of personal and political history, present, and futures. In it, I try to reckon with archives both public and personal, newspapers to family photo albums, with ecologies of doom and magic, mourning the lost, mapping escape routes, building Indigenous postcolonial futurisms, and, I hope, preserving some recipes for healing.
The gift of time at any residency is always precious. Doubly so to have time in Southern Appalachia, a place that means so much. Working on a book with content this intense requires periods of recovery and metabolism — not just of information and research — but of the implications of historical violence and present crises. My current experience of Long Covid disability means that my work also has to follow the demands, limits, and unscheduled insights of chronic illness.
As a disabled writer writing about disability and the unjust conditions that create disability and debility, my work benefits from longer residencies to accommodate these rhythms of rest, research, digestion, writing, and recovery. I dearly welcome a residency in community with others who understand community work and artistic practice as deeply linked.
I have dearly missed the South and my home state of Georgia. As a writer who engaged with ecology, environmental justice, and Indigenous lineages, being able to work in regions of the South I know well deeply nourishes my work and reflection. I am so grateful to return to familiar forests as a grounding for creative work about my own experiences of the Southeast.
Receiving this year’s Writer-In-Service honors from The Lillian E. Smith Center puts me humbly in line with colleagues and elders whose work and lives have guided me. That sense of connection and meaning feels especially precious, especially now. The safety to create uncensored work to honor my queer, trans, disabled, Palestinian, Muslim, Southern, and Indigenous identities and communities feels full of transformative possibility in this time of escalating global crises. I welcome this refuge in which to work at a sustainable pace and, in turn, offer support and care for organizers and artists in my communities so they, too, can survive and thrive.
Dr. Jane McPherson is the 2023 recipient of the Gabriele-Stauf Residency Award. McPherson is an Associate Professor at The University of Georgia School of Social Work who will use her residency to deepen her scholarship and teaching in the histories—particularly Georgia histories—of social work and social welfare.
On receiving the award, McPherson said, “Like Lillian Smith, I believe that we must understand history in order to learn from it, of course, but also to assess how our current policies and practices are shaped by it, and to determine how to create more just practices moving forward.”
The Gabriele-Stauf Residency Award provides a complimentary two-week retreat at the Center for an educator who is working on a project that would benefit from a residency. Gabriele Stauf, Professor Ermerita of English at Georgia Southwestern State University, and she sponsors this annual award because she understands the value of time and solitude required for creative pursuits.
You can hear more about McPherson’s research on the Lillian E. Smith Center’s podcast Dope with Lime.
Clair Eisele is the recipient of the 2023 McClure-Scanlin Visual Artist Residency Award. Clair is a recent graduate of Piedmont University’s art program. She hails from San Diego, California, and has lived in Georgia for the past five years. She served seven and a half years in the United States Air Force and holds an associate degree in Sustainable Urban Agriculture from San Diego City College.
In 2017, Clair left California in a truck and cab over camper and made her way east by way of “WWOOFing” through Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms. This led her to a farmto-table bed and breakfast in Sautee Nacoochee, Georgia. Inspired by the landscape, Clair purchased a one-hundred-year-old farmhouse in Lexington.
Clair has spent her time in Georgia learning about the piedmont ecosystem, focusing on native plants, beneficial insects, and snakes. She returned to her lifelong interest in art in 2021 when she entered Piedmont’s Department of Art. She is currently working on a series of paintings and drawings that take the creepy out of the crawlies. She hopes to promote insect education and to encourage comfort around harmless—and often beneficial—insects and backyard friends.
The McClure-Scanlin Award is made possible through a generous gift to Piedmont College from Tommye Scanlin and her husband, Thomas. Tommye is a member of the LES Center Advisory Board and a long-time LES Center Fellow. The award recipient is selected in consultation with faculty members of the Piedmont Department of Art and receives a complimentary two-week residency at the Center.
Aaron McMullin is recipient of the 2023 Emily Pierce Graduate Student Residency Award. McMullin is a conceptually driven multimedia artist and activist working primarily in textiles and photography. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Sarah Lawrence College in 2009 and is currently a 2nd year MFA candidate in Textiles at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Over the last decade, she has worked as a community arts organizer and educator. She has held the titles of Teaching Artist, AmeriCorps VISTA, and Co-Facilitator for an anti-racist book club.
In 2011, Aaron received a Fulbright-Nehru Research Grant and a Critical Language Enhancement Award to study cotton farming in India. While conducting research in India, she was a contributing editor for the book Invisible Hands: Human Rights and the Global Economy. In 2015 Aaron received an Artist Support Grant from the Regional Arts Commission and returned to India to work with cotton farmers on a collaborative portrait series, Faceless Farmers. In 2020 she received a Competitive Graduate Award from SIUE. In 2021 and 2022, her artwork won awards in photography and textiles at the annual juried student exhibition at SIUE. Aaron is dedicated to nurturing collaboration, creativity, compassion, and connection through the exploration of art and community.
Named after one of the first Lillian E. Smith Scholars, the Emily Pierce Graduate Residency provides the opportunities for graduate students whose work moves us towards a more equitable society. It includes a complimentary two-week retreat at the Center and an honorarium.
IN HONOR OF *The following gifts were made to honor someone.
Dr. Nancy and Robert Fichter
Dennise M. Hewlett
Carol Wood
Laurel Circle ($1,000+)
Nanette and Christopher Curran
John Siegel and John Templeton
Dr. Margaret R. Gladney
Dr. Nancy Smith and Robert Fichter
Ann O’Connor
Sherrill W Ragans
Dr. Patricia Bell Scott
Dr. Gabriele U. Stauf
Dr. Matthew and Melissa Teutsch
William Tribby
Benefactor ($500+)
Christopher M. Burnside
Bettina George
Promoter ($200+)
Brenda Bynum
Molly Elkind
Dr. Jane McPherson
Susan Montgomery
Patsy Palmer
Dr. Marilynn Richtarik
Ann H Smith
Sponsor ($50+)
Tom Callahan
Dr. Donald Gnecco
Rose McCall
Dr. Lillian Reeves
Audrey Straight
Mary Walker
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MEMORIAL *The Following gifts were made in memory of a loved one or friend.
Annie Laurie Smith Peeler
Carol Wood